In a scenario where the function of a game becomes a tool not only to kill time but also to overcome fear, the game has to serve as an anesthetic.

In the short-story <The Garden of Forking Paths> written by Borges (1941), the ambition of making a labyrinth to make everyone lost by Ts’ui Pen, the governor of Yunnan province, was never realized or at least found. However, such a worry of losing oneselves–losing the bearings within the labyrinth has been used in the Desert Island Game Scenario to replace the horror of death.

Isn’t the death also a kind of bearing for a life?

Pavilions@ Music Square, Music Square (1)

Narratives, Nationalities & Aesthetics:

As a writer born in Argentine, it seems easier for Borges’ to write this story using the background of World War 1 as during the war time Argentine held a neutral state. However the pure enjoyment (or aesthetics) from reading a novel—-the mere words, descriptions and paragraph structures (see below) might be discounted if the readers’ nationalities are involved in that war.

“I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreadinglabyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars”…”The road descended and forked among the now confused meadows. A high-pitched, almost syllabic music approached and receded in the shifting of the wind, dimmed by leaves and

distance.” (from <The Garden of Forking Paths>, Borges, 1941: 4, 5)

Pavilions ? @Music Square, Funan River(2)

Pavilions:

“I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets. Thus I arrived before a tall rusty gate. Between the iron bars I made out a poplar grove and a pavilion. I understood suddenly two things, the first trivial, the second almost unbelievable: the music came from the pavilion, and the music was Chinese.” (from <The Garden of Forking Paths>, Borges, 1941: 5) (Pictures from http://dp.pconline.com.cn/photo/list_351059.html)